Gotham Diary:
Things and Not Things
17 June 2014
The most interesting discovery that I made this season was that tea cosies work. They will keep a pot of tea hot for a long time. Kathleen says, “The British know a thing or two.” But true as that might be, the British also have a reputation for suffering and resignation. If anyone would cover a handsome teapot with an ineffective, dopey fabric covering, it would be the Brits. “Tea doesn’t seem right without it,” they’d say with a shrug.
But the tea cosy that I bought in Bermuda ages ago, and that, for years, I used to cover the toaster (when it was not in use), really works!
Here’s why I made this discovery: At a recent annual physical exam, my heart was found to have fallen into atrial fibrillation. This sounded like the end of the world for about five days (until I saw the cardiologist), but it turned out that there no need for anything but a bit of blood-thinning medication. (I keep calling it “Xaltra.” Isn’t that a great name? There ought to be something called “Xaltra,” don’t you think? But what would it do?) Among the causes of atrial fibrillation is caffeine. The cardiologist doubted that I could be drinking enough tea for caffeine to be a problem, but he didn’t know about my stove-top kettle, into which the cold contents of every teapot was poured and reheated, day after day after day. Having got rid of the microwave oven, this was how I supplied myself with mugs of slowly stewing, deepening, concentrating, possibly metastasizing tea. Every once in a while, I would get to the bottom of the kettle without having any fresh leftovers to pour in, and the kettle would go into the dishwasher for rehabilitation. Weeks might go by between such interventions. The cardiologist is undoubtedly right, but I’ve cut way back on tea, by 80% or more. I make tea in a small pot that yields about three mugs-full. The cosy keeps the pot hot right to the last drop.
***
I’ve been thinking a lot about some ordinary things, things so ordinary that the words for them come to everybody’s lips without thought or question.
The ordinary thing that probably comes less to everybody’s lips than the other two is the world. What is the world? It is not the Earth. It is the miscellany of stuff produced by generations of the past that continues to exist all around me — buildings, artworks, laws, printed literature, records of every kind. I don’t include streets or roads or airplanes or cargo ships, or many other useful things, because these wear out — that’s expected — and are replaced. (Some things that are regularly replaced, like the temple at Nara, are however very much part of the world. And we have made great strides in preserving old clothing — our most palpable contact with vanished ways of life.) A Stradivarius violin is part of the world. Almost anything surviving from classical antiquity, no matter how trivial its original function, is part of the world. Everything in the world can be destroyed, burned, repealed, or thrown into the sea, but one of the side-effects of our advancing humanity is the increasing solicitude that we show toward significant survivals.
(Disney World is seriously mis-named. Not a thing in Disney World belongs in the world. I don’t understand why “Disney Dream” wouldn’t be more appealing. Even better, “Disney Dome.”)
Like a child, I spend a lot of time deciding what belongs in the world and what doesn’t. It’s a kind of play, because, as the foregoing paragraph indicates, I already know. Here’s a handy example: the American Constitution is a worldly thing, but the British Constitution is not. The British Constitution has never been written down, and it does not exist in any objective form. There might be a few scholars who are genuine authorities on the “contents” of the British Constitution, but their authority pales into insignificance beside the written articles of the American Constitution, which have been there, unchanging (however amended), for everyone to read, since 1789.
This led to a bit of a flash. The British Constitution is really a tradition. And a tradition is not a worldly thing. Robert’s Rules of Order exists primarily because nobody wants to rely on a tradition for organizing public meetings and registering public decisions. Let’s have it in black and white, please.
Nor is society a worldly thing. Tradition and society are the other ordinary things that I’ve been thinking about. Over the weekend, it occurred to me that tradition and society, while not the same thing, are the same sort of thing. They stand in the same relation to the world.
Very crudely — I may well live to regret making this alluring comparison — tradition and society are like software applications that, among many other purposes, govern the use of the hardware of the world. (Just as consciousness, as I think Daniel Dennett once proposed, is software for reporting on the activity of the hardware of the brain.)
Society and tradition change very slowly — or such is the impression of mortal men who rarely follow the course of either for as much as a century. Both society (a body of “rules” the observance of which allows me to live harmoniously with my neighbors) and tradition (a kind of liturgy for the marking of special occasions) can change quickly enough in times of upheaval, but their usual course is to leak meaning, like air from a punctured tire, until they become nuisances. Unlike the patched tire, however, the fixed, corrected, or reformed tradition or social order is never restored to its original condition but adapted to suit inevitably new circumstances. They develop, so to speak, new wrinkles.
The fact that there exists a popular book called What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew testifies to the mutability of society and tradition. It is possible to read the novels of either of these writers without consulting Daniel Pool’s guide, but many of the details will be mysterious, and some even impenetrable. This is not the problem that Chaucer poses; the language of Austen and Dickens remains easily comprehensible to anyone with a high-school education. But many of the customs that governed the lives of their characters have passed out of use — and it is not so very long ago that they were writing, either: the bicentennial of Austen’s death is still a few years off. Now, two hundred years may sound like a long time, but the whole point of tradition is to seem timeless. We could quibble all day about whether the fact that, in Pride and Prejudice, Jane is “Miss Bennett” to the world, while all her sisters, at least until her marriage, are known by their full names, is a social rule or a tradition, but the simple truth is that the usage was extinct within a century. And I doubt that it was all that hoary in Austen’s day.
I might go so far as to subsume society and tradition within my 150-year rule. But I’ll have to think about it.
Daily Blague news update: In the Best Way Possible.